6 Reasons 'Resident Evil' Movies Are Better than the Games

#3. The Movies Have a Better Primary Character

Another complaint is how the movies star a brand new character, Alice.

Constantin FilmClearly not equipped to star in a zombie action movie.

First, if you're complaining about the addition of Milla Jovovich to anything, up to and including "the team of detonation experts defusing a bomb implanted in my skull," I will never understand you. Second, anyone who likes the Resident Evil games but accuses people of bad acting should paradox out of existence instead of posting on the Internet.

Third, movies need a central character. The games can hop around like an STD on Jersey Shore, multiplying with stupid people who don't know how to protect themselves against viruses. You've got Chris Redfield, the world's worst special forces soldier, who led his own sister into two separate zombie deathtraps because he couldn't be bothered to use a phone.

CapcomHe's also the result of an Umbrella experiment to cross watermelons with the human bicep.

There's Jill Valentine, master of unlocking and overused jokes, whose idea of preparing for a zombie holocaust is exposing as much flesh as possible.

CapcomBy this logic, she'd wear a tube top to the moon.

Not that the Resident Evil games have trouble with cliches and respecting female characters, but when they brainwashed her as an obedient servant in RE5, the process physically turned her blonde.

Capcom

You've got Leon S. Kennedy, a character so unlikable that even when investigating the president's kidnapped daughter, the Secret Service sent him on his own. I'm not saying it's hard to take Mr. Emohair seriously as a badass, but he has his own fashion clothing line.

Capcom"Losing vision in one eye helps with fashion shooting, not so much with actual shooting."

Claire Redfield's plan for finding her missing brother was:
1) Stumble through a zombified city in America
2) Immediately break into a heavily armed Umbrella facility in Paris
3) Get sent to a virus-infected death camp in the South Pacific
4) Then, and only then, try email. This works.

Capcom"Me not good at plan."

Rebecca Chambers is the world's most annoying medic. You'd rather succumb to T-virus infection than spend enough time with her to be treated.

CapcomAlternate costumes designed by the same guy who wrote William Birkin.

And most of them turn up in the movies anyway. Even Barry "Useless Beard" Burton is set to arrive in the new movie, and starring in Resident Evil Gaiden should have erased him from existence.

#2. No Files in the Movies

The movies are permanently better because NO FILES. Ten percent of the game plot was delivered by the worst voice actors reading the worst writing in the world, and for the other 90 percent, they couldn't afford voice actors. The intro cinematic had already ruined movies, so the game went after reading. It was trying to win by destroying everything else in the world with exposure to its evil. Which is Umbrella Corporation's actual corporate strategy.

CapcomI could have been playing Deus Ex. I was a moron in 2000.

#1. The Movies Have a Better Sequel Strategy

At last count, the games had nine different kinds of virus and parasite. It's like they got confused about whether people were playing because they liked to shoot zombies or because they were interested in virologist fan fiction. Since any one of the viruses in the game can apparently do anything, it's more pointless replication of terrible things than the Kardashian family. The movies streamlined the virus count to just two, T-virus and the antivirus, both of which created monsters ... which logically should mean that everything in the world becomes a monster. And in the only case of a video game movie using logic, that's exactly what happens.

Constantin Film

In the game, the huge, villainous Umbrella Corporation is destroyed off camera between games by the villains, ensuring that the heroes achieved nothing. Umbrella is then immediately replaced by the identical Tricell corporation, just to remind players that they're wasting their time. Bizarrely, the movies are better at rebooting between levels than the computer games. The movies approach sequels like tank combat: The old one blows up, so you make the new one bigger and even more awesome. They haven't had to retcon because anything that could have complicated the story is blatantly blown up at the start of the next movie, even if it's the entire world, the cliffhanger they'd promised in the previous movie, a hundred clones of the main character, or all three.

Constantin FilmAnd it's still less stupid than how Agent Smith lost.

The movies are incredibly, hilariously, defiantly stupid, but they work. Each Resident Evil movie makes more money than the one before, which is exactly the kind of exponential profit from disasters the Umbrella Corporation would have been going for all this time. The movies get terrible reviews but are a huge amount of fun. And I think that now, together, we've grown enough to admit that the games were the exact opposite.